Last year, embattled Arizona lawyer Charles Carreon brought a lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, doubling down by suing anonymous Internet commenters and even two charities, the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. (The whole crazy story also involved a cartoon of an obese woman asking a bear to "Come hurr and love meeee!") Things got even weirder when Carreon threatened Chris Recouvreur, also known "Satirical Charles," who had created a website mocking Carreon. Recouvreur then sued Carreon in federal court for a declarative judgement that his site was not libelous.

In a Tuesday legal filing with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Charles Carreon dropped his final appeal in the Recouvreur case and now definitively owes over $46,000 in fees to Recouvreur.

Now Carreon says he regrets the entire affair. Why? Largely because it has unleashed the wrath of angry people on the Internet and has subsequently damaged his reputation online.

“I genuinely say it was a dumb thing,” Carreon told Ars. “This is not a soluble problem. This is not a problem that is soluble with a legal cease-and-desist letter, or a counter cease-and-desist letter. I would not have sent that and I really reassess the decision thoroughly. It was not a good idea. You really are dealing with a situation that is not amenable to legal resolution.”

“I made it worse”

Carreon was a little-known lawyer until June 2012, at which point he began representing the website FunnyJunk.com and sued Matthew Inman, demanding $20,000 over comments Inman had made about FunnyJunk's habit of hosting Inman's cartoons. Inman then turned around and raised $100,000, giving that money to charity instead of to Carreon, at which point Carreon escalated his legal filings. At one point, Carreon even threatened to subpoena Ars Technica. (Ars’ collected coverage of the entire affair can be read here.)

In a 30-minute phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as he calls it, "rapeutated." In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long, and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours truly and two more Ars staffers. If you'd like to see a picture of Carreon's critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their mouths, that too can be accommodated.

In short, Carreon portrays himself as the victim here—he’s now become the victim of the Streisand effect, or as it might now be called, the Carreon effect.

“So when you take a situation in which the legal rules don’t impose any effective sanctions on people for that kind of behavior, mob behavior on the Internet, then a legal analyst like myself should look at that situation and say: ‘You can’t fix everything that’s broken,’” he said. “There is not a proper legal remedy for it. I attempted to do something and I made it worse.”

“It’s an insoluble problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching ‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense. How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.”

But lest the Internet think that Carreon is a bad guy with a continual ax to grind, he suggested that his Buddhist religion can help him forgive those who have wronged him.

“If I feel that something that I have said should not have been said, and somebody calls it to my attention, I generally will alter or retract it,” he said. “[Similarly,] if anyone wants to contact me in any reasonable manner, I will be happy to hear it. The point of speech is to spark discussion. My goal is to help people to realize that you’re not the only person who gets rapeutated. You need to put on your own psychological resources together to survive it. Of course this is difficult. The fact that I try to bear it with aplomb, it is difficult. Yeah, I have a lot of shit to process—I’m glad I'm a resilient person.”

“It doesn’t matter what my intentions are,” he added. “I’m learning the rules of the game. I’ve learned about mobs. I’ve learned about how blithely we can deal with other people. I never thought that people would say things about me that they did. I’m always learning. If I didn’t learn, I would truly be stupid. The fact that I learn slowly or don't know things that other people know, that doesn't make me genuinely stupid, it makes me situationally stupid.”

The easy way or the hard way

Though the legal battles sparked by Carreon's actions have ceased, it's up to Recouvreur's attorney, Paul Alen Levy of Public Citizen, to recover the money. Levy told Ars on Wednesday that it would be very easy for Carreon to finally wrap up this entire story.

“He makes a payment, we agree that he’s made the payment, and there’s a satisfaction of judgement,” Levy said. “That’s the simple way to do it.” If not, Levy will have to go through legal discovery to determine the size of Carreon's assets.

Levy said there isn’t a chance that he and his client will allow the case to be dropped without any consequences for Carreon.

“Given the amount, it’s hard to walk away from it,” he said. “We’re not willing to let the money just sit there. I really don’t know at this point what assets [Carreon] has. He has a law practice. Presumably he’s getting paid at his law practice—but you hate to think about that.”

As for Carreon, he wouldn't be pinned down on whether he would pay, but he did say that the whole ordeal had been a strain.

“Whenever you have to spend a lot of time doing stuff that is not remunerative, that is financial hardship,” Carreon said. “If somebody is making me do stuff by suing me, sure, it’s taking a bite out of my time.”

Promoted Comments

As a buddhist, I just wanted to chime in here and say, all this guy's behaviors are inherently ego-driven, which is the opposite of what buddhist practice is. And the fact that he jumps in and says he can forgive due to his buddhism is kinda hard to swallow.

The central teaching he's gotta remember would be this: Let it go

Also, it's not really a religion, imo. Sorry for being a bit off-topic

I find it hard to feel any sympathy for Charles. He started this affair but even before this affair, it's how he made his living. He'd sue anyone for anything and most people don't have the financial resources to fight frivolous lawsuits like the Oatmeal did. His mistake wasn't suing the creator of the Oatmeal, he'd done that sort of thing repeatedly in the past. His mistake was not understanding that the Oatmeal is a really popular website and could generate the power of the net in it's defense. It's one thing to sue some poor schmuck without a lot of money or fame and force them to quickly settle or end up going completely broke fighting a frivolous lawsuit, it's another to sue someone who can get thousands or millions of fans pissed off and willing to help either financially or through publicizing what a douche you are. I'm pretty sure he's still willing to sue unimportant nobodies but I doubt he'd want to sue a site like Ars or Penny Arcade anymore. Geez can you imagine the reaction of the PA readers if he tried to sue Mike or Jerry?

Let's see if I have this correct. A criminal hosting a criminal website, hired a criminal as a lawyer to sue an innocent person. According to this article, the criminal lawyer pretends to be butt-hurt .....

He's a disgusting example of a self-absorbed narcissistic jerk who STILL doesn't get it. He now laments that HE can't impose HIS world view on the rest of the world. HE wants it that after all the bad stuff he did, NONE of it would show up to prospective clients.

There's a name for people who say they've learned their lesson, but in fact the only lesson they've learned is that SOMETIMES they have to live with SOME of the consequences of their actions.

This self-absorbed jerk would do well to leave his sociopathy behind and pay the legal bills HE caused to be created, and quit whining about how the net accurately reflects what he did.

“It doesn’t matter what my intentions are,” [Carreon] added. “I’m learning the rules of the game. I’ve learned about mobs. I’ve learned about how blithely we can deal with other people. I never thought that people would say things about me that they did. I’m always learning. If I didn’t learn, I would truly be stupid. The fact that I learn slowly or don't know things that other people know, that doesn't make me genuinely stupid, it makes me situationally stupid.”

Unfortunately, Carreon doesn't seem to have learned what should have been the most important lesson: that his actions that started this whole mess, namely suing Inman for complaining that FunnyJunk was ripping him off, was wrong.

In other news, water is wet and the sun is hot. Sometimes I feel like this guy just can't let anything die or let himself fall out of the news. We already knew you were an idiot, Charles, stop pointing it out.

As an aside, am I the only one irked by him calling it 'rapeutated' and that he created a website for it? Dude, you were not violently, sexually assaulted, no one forced any non-consensual sexual contact with you. Throwing the word rape around just makes you look like more of a jackass.

Chicken and egg question. Do you have to be a sociopath to become a lawyer, or does being a lawyer turn you into a sociopath? Honestly, between this guy, prenda, the numerous copyright and patent trolls, etc...I'm really starting to wonder.

Chicken and egg question. Do you have to be a sociopath to become a lawyer, or does being a lawyer turn you into a sociopath? Honestly, between this guy, prenda, the numerous copyright and patent trolls, etc...I'm really starting to wonder.

“Whenever you have to spend a lot of time doing stuff that is not remunerative, that is financial hardship,” Carreon said. “If somebody is making me do stuff by suing me, sure, it’s taking a bite out of my time.”

SERIOUSLY? He's just discovered that having to defend yourself is an expensive and unprofitable time waster?

I know it isn't wrong but I hated that he kept using insoluble instead of unsolvable... I just think that spelling should be resolved for dissolving something. Also the Rapeutated should garner him some more criticism, I thought marginalizing rape was a big no no on the internet these days and that's exactly what these seems to be. His attempt at being clever because of the bear joke only makes this worse. Its not like I don't want to keep hearing about him but I like the articles that make him look like the jackass he is more, although this one did it subtly which made it pretty satisfying.

I find it hard to feel any sympathy for Charles. He started this affair but even before this affair, it's how he made his living. He'd sue anyone for anything and most people don't have the financial resources to fight frivolous lawsuits like the Oatmeal did. His mistake wasn't suing the creator of the Oatmeal, he'd done that sort of thing repeatedly in the past. His mistake was not understanding that the Oatmeal is a really popular website and could generate the power of the net in it's defense. It's one thing to sue some poor schmuck without a lot of money or fame and force them to quickly settle or end up going completely broke fighting a frivolous lawsuit, it's another to sue someone who can get thousands or millions of fans pissed off and willing to help either financially or through publicizing what a douche you are. I'm pretty sure he's still willing to sue unimportant nobodies but I doubt he'd want to sue a site like Ars or Penny Arcade anymore. Geez can you imagine the reaction of the PA readers if he tried to sue Mike or Jerry?

As a buddhist, I just wanted to chime in here and say, all this guy's behaviors are inherently ego-driven, which is the opposite of what buddhist practice is. And the fact that he jumps in and says he can forgive due to his buddhism is kinda hard to swallow.

The central teaching he's gotta remember would be this: Let it go

Also, it's not really a religion, imo. Sorry for being a bit off-topic

Echoing aldis' sentiment, carelessly using the word rape is not only unwarranted, it's unfair to *actual* rape victims. This poor fellow probably has some deep seated issues that need to be worked out in therapy.

Chicken and egg question. Do you have to be a sociopath to become a lawyer, or does being a lawyer turn you into a sociopath? Honestly, between this guy, prenda, the numerous copyright and patent trolls, etc...I'm really starting to wonder.

Hey - there are a lot of good lawyers out there. What about the New Egg guy? I'm sure I can find at least a handful of others.

He just cannot accept it was HIM that `done goofed` and now his consequences will never be the same...

The internet are the bullies? Not a poor abused, sue-happy lawyera throwing motions around like beads at carnivale, forcing people to be out of pocket just to respond....

Quote:

Not long after all the routine work was done, the client asked me to look at this webpage on TheOatmeal.com, slagging FunnyJunk. Excellent. More work. Happy to do it.

Wait, 'you' take work going after `slagging off`, when it was a legitimate complaint (and copyright theft), and then proceed to turn around on your own personal website and ... slag off critics.

The disconnect is staggering.

Oh and arent there laws about online libel and slander? would be delicious irony if his ass ends up in court over defamation, labelling ars technica staff (readers and critics) as the equivalent of online rapists - yeah, there`s free speech, then you get into hate speech and incitation - of course Im more familiar with UK / Euro law (as seen by the recent Lord McAlpine furore) - American law is probably different given the first ammendments enshrined therein.

Chicken and egg question. Do you have to be a sociopath to become a lawyer, or does being a lawyer turn you into a sociopath? Honestly, between this guy, prenda, the numerous copyright and patent trolls, etc...I'm really starting to wonder.

Hey - there are a lot of good lawyers out there. What about the New Egg guy? I'm sure I can find at least a handful of others.

He is a smart guy and looks at things through the lens of an attorney as do most attorneys. When attorneys see something, they think in terms of legal recourse and how to solve the issue. He's a good attorney and an awfully nice guy who somehow got caught up in a messy affair.

"Awfully nice guy[s]" don't create words like "rapeutation" and (imo, at least) libellously blame others for problems they started. They don't have websites with pictures of their opponents spewing feces from their mouths.

He may be an intelligent guy, but he's definitely not a nice guy. And, personally, I wouldn't call him smart; I've known a lot of intelligent people that lack common sense, and Carreon seems to fall solidly into that category.

Doesn't seem like a "biased" statement to me. He was of course known in some circles for the sex.com case—but not on the Internet at large. The Oatmeal thing really brought him to the attention of a huge national (and international) audience.